The Auke Bay Laboratory is offering tours of the Ted Stevens Marine Research Institute at Lena Point; it's a chance for the public to find out exactly what it is that they do in this world class facility.
Steve Ignell, the Deputy Director of Auke Bay Laboratories, told us a little about their mission.

"The Auke bay Laboratory is part of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center, and our mission is to provide good science so that the management of the nation's resources can be sustained.
So the Auke bay Laboratory is part of the infrastructure, this facility that we use to accomplish that, so today in the tour you will find a number of different laboratories, there's a chemistry lab and there's a genetics lab, for example the genetics lab is used to do analysis of stack composition of salmon caught in the Pollock fishery, it's a big issue in Alaska and again that relates to our mission,
Another interesting part of this facility is we no longer burn any oil and that's sort of a marquis thing that we've done recently, and that is to use the seawater system that we use in our wet lab and other parts of our research here to extract a little bit of heat from that and use that to heat the building,
It's really part of our mission to inform the public and to explain to them why we do what we do, why we conduct the scientific investigations that lead to responsible and sustainable management of our nations resources, and we do that a variety of different ways. We do it through Sea Week where we bring our school kids in and teach them about the ocean. So there's a lot of different ways that we accomplish this mission of bringing our science to the public in an educational format and this tour that we're doing today is just one of the many ways."

The tours take about an hour and are open to people age 16 and over Monday thru Friday at 1 o'clock through September 2nd.